Harold T & Hal White Scholarship

Ladarrius McBeth didn’t just land a culinary arts scholarship at Hinds; he also received an opportunity to get hands-on experience because of the Harold T. & Hal White Endowed Scholarship. McBeth, who is studying culinary arts on the Utica Campus, is alsointerning at Hal & Mal’s in downtown Jackson.

“I’m earning a little bit of money and getting more experience in my field,” McBeth said.

The scholarship was originally created in memory of Harold T. White, who was president of Northeast Mississippi Community College and a great friend of Hinds President Emeritus Dr. Clyde Muse.

He served as the sixth president of Northeast Mississippi Community College for 22 years, from 1965 until his death in 1987.

Among his many accomplishments as a community college president was the creation of the Hotel-Motel Restaurant Management Program in 1973. Hal White was in the first class to graduate from the program in fall 1974.

Hal co-founded Hal & Mal’s bar and restaurant in downtown Jackson in 1985 along with his brother, Malcolm White. The two brothers established the scholarship in honor of their late father in 1990. Hal’s name was added when he passed away in 2013.

“When my father passed in 1987 we decided to create a scholarship at Hinds and because my brother Hal had graduated from the first school of restaurant hotel management at Northeast, which my father created,” Malcolm White said. “By then we’d opened the restaurant so that we could create this unique sort of intern scholarship. I thought it would be important that they (recipients) actually work in a restaurant, which is very different than studying about it.”

In 2022, Malcolm sold the restaurant to Damien and Mary Sanders Ferriss Cavicchi.

“We discussed it (the scholarship and internship) as something we’d both like to see continued even after the sale of the business,” he said.

White said he explained how the process had been working, with Hinds selecting a pool of candidates to be interviewed. The new owners interviewed the candidates, selecting McBeth.

“I’m very happy that this tradition can be continued,” White said.